


Gourmet

by everyperfectsummer



Series: Tumblr Prompts [30]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-10-12 04:45:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10482369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyperfectsummer/pseuds/everyperfectsummer
Summary: Prompt: ColdFlash, Barry trying to cook Len a surprise dinner but epicly failing.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nixie_DeAngel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nixie_DeAngel/gifts).



> Warnings: food mentions

Swaying back and forth slightly, bopping along to music in his head, he swiveled, contemplating the kitchen, weighing the available ingredients against what he knew how to cook. They’d had chicken with their pasta yesterday, and a plain tomato sauce the day before, so today would be a good day to add fish. 

 

He wandered into the living room to consult Len.

 

“What if I made pasta with fish sauce?”

 

Len shrugged, not looking up from his book. “Ok.”

 

Barry smiled, and returned to the kitchen, dumping salt and pasta into the pot, and starting on the sauce. He began humming as he zipped around the kitchen, making one of three sauces Joe had taught him when he’d realized that anything fancier than souped up sauces were beyond Barry’s skill range.

 

Thirty minutes later, still dancing slightly to music only he could hear, he went back to the living room. “Pasta’s ready!” he chirped, to receive a shrug in response.

 

“Ok.”

 

“ _ So, _ it’s time for dinner!”

 

Len slowly and deliberately turned the page, before saying, “For you. I’ll eat something else.”

 

“But I made pasta?” Barry said, half exclamation, half confused question.

 

“I don’t like pasta.”

 

Barry’s face turned indignant.

 

“You said you wanted pasta!”

 

“No, I said it would be  _ ok _ if you made pasta.”

 

“It’s the only thing I know how to make!”

 

Finally looking up Len said, “It’s not the only thing I know how to eat, however, and since we eat pasta  _ every time you cook, _ I’m more than a little sick of it.”

 

“Fine!” Barry could feel his lip wobbling, turned to leave the room in case he started actually crying.

 

Len, however, noticed the wobble and put his book down, getting up from the couch. “Hey, Barry, it’s fine, I’m not trying to insult you. I just don’t want to eat pasta for the fifty third time in the past sixty days. Ok?”

 

Barry nodded, mentally going over their past meals, and realizing that they really did eat pasta for at least one meal nearly every day. The tally was making his lip wobble situation worse, not better. “‘Kay.”

 

Len frowned at him, clearly able to tell it wasn’t ok, but just then his metahuman alert app went off. “Gotta go,” he said, even though Len knew what the alert meant just as well as he did.

 

Len reached for his book again and said, “I’ll see you when you get back.”

 

A hour and what felt like his creepiest fight yet later - how a  _ giant spider _ meta, of all things, existed seemed like proof of some dark force out to torment him - he returned home, only to find Len halfway through a plate of pasta heaped heavy with fish sauce. Barry felt his lip wobble again and Len’s face grew alarmed as Barry started crying.

 

“Was the fight that bad?” he asked, clearly concerned.

 

Barry shook his head, unable to vocalize the confusion of emotions in his chest.

 

“Bear?”

 

“Happy crying,” he clarified, “not sad. Don’t worry about it. But man, I am very glad for you in my life, and also very glad that your attacks on me did not include spiders, because once was way too many times to be fighting a spider.”

 

“What happened to the boyfriend who scolded me for trying to kill one and instead brought it outside in a paper cup, all the while talking about the sanctity of life?”

 

They relaxed into their normal banter, pasta seemingly forgotten. Barry, however, had a new self assigned mission, that he began to work on as soon as he arrived at work the next day.

 

“I need to learn how to cook,” he explained to Julian, “by the time I get home from work tonight. It’s an emergency!”

 

“How, pray tell, is  _ learning to cook _ an emergency?”

 

“Because all I can make is pasta so that’s what we’ve been eating when it’s my turn to cook but my boyfriend is sick of it but he’ll still eat it to make me happy but I want  _ him  _ to be happy and not eating things he hates and -” Julian held out a hand.

 

“I think I get the gist, mate.”

 

“So you’ll help me?”

 

“We’re in a  _ crime lab _ , we are not cooking here.”

 

Barry just looked at him, and Julian sighed. “You are not skiving off work to learn to cook, so what you should do is learn by reading - read through the library’s entire online selection of cookbooks, for example -  _ in between doing your work. _ ”

 

Barry hugged him, and then sped around to start all his work and get it done so that he could have time to read. Speeding through as fast as he could, he’d soon devoured the library, Allrecipes, and Buzzfeed’s collections - and gotten quite a few experiments done, as well, under Julian’s exasperated-yet-amused gaze.

 

Finally, he settled on trying out some recipes that seemed reminiscent of what his mom had used to make - flautas with a simple corn, tomato, and onion salad. She’d made them all the time, and the recipes both seemed fairly simple. Pretty hard to go wrong there. 

 

He starts with the chicken, preparing it, peeling bits off, putting them in a glass dish, and sticking them in the over. Then he turns to the salads. First, tomatoes and onions. He took a knife to the tomato, bracing it in one hand - or rather, as it turned out, squishing it completely with said hand. He tried on another tomato, and achieved slightly more success. The pieces were a little mushed, but edible. Right?  _ Probably, _ Barry decided, before turning to the onions.

 

These, fortunately, were harder to crush. Unfortunately, however, chopping them had the side effect of making his eyes water so hard he couldn’t see. He lifted the hand holding the onion to his eyes to clear them out, only to be rewarded with double the burn as the juices hit his eye. Cursing, he waited for the pain to fade, only to realize that he’d forgotten about the chicken.

 

He turned and quickly removed it from the oven, seeing that it was nicely cooked and not burnt, as he’d feared. Ok, the chicken is cooked, so next step is frying it...he poured oil in the pan, wrapped the chicken bits in tortillas, and stuck the flautas in the frying pan. To his dismay, they started coming unrolled almost immediately, and he desperately tried to reroll them without getting his fingers in the hot oil. Although, now that he came to think about it, the oil wasn’t that hot. He stuck a finger in the oil to check, only to yank it out and start sucking on it because  _ owwww. _ Looking at the sorry attempts at flautas in the pan, it was clear that the oil was too cool to fry things, but just hot enough to burn his finger. Great.

 

He heard the front door open and shut, accompanied by a “Hey, Barry!” from Len.

 

“Heyyyy,” Barry said, looking at the attempts at dinner in the kitchen.

 

Len walked in, took stock of the kitchen, and valiantly attempted to keep a straight face.

 

“Interesting new pasta sauce?”

 

Barry shook his head. “Not pasta.”

 

“May I ask the occasion?”

 

Barry shrugged. “I thought it was sweet of you to keep eating the pasta for so long, including eating it last night, so I wanted to make you something that wasn’t pasta.”

 

“Ok, eating the pasta last night was me trying to make up for being a jerk last night, so you didn’t need to do this, but I think the fact that you did  _ is _ sweet.”

 

“...sweet enough that you’ll eat what I made for dinner?”

 

Len winced slightly, but assented. “Sounds great, Barry.”

 

Barry looked at the ruined food that, in the hands of any other cook than him, might have actually become a delicious dinner, and smiled. 

 

“How about we eat take out, instead?”


End file.
